[rstuart4133]

I'm a DD. His points left me scratching my head. Yes, Debian's infrastructure is old, but so is Big Ben and just a Big Ben still does an admirable job of broadcasting the time to the locals, Debian Bug Tracker does an admirable job of tracking bugs. I get it that he personally might prefer to interact with it via a more modern web page, but that wouldn't alter how well it tracks bugs or facilitates discussions. And besides, I find email easier to interact with automatically than a web page. Oddly he goes on to list not being able to automate things as a complaint.

The same goes for the rest of the things he lists. Yes, he might prefer to do them some other way, but the way they are done now has obviously been working very well for a long time.

As for Debian being incapable of making big changes - that's just rubbish. He's been there for 10 years for pete's sake, systemd was a big change requiring many packages to updated spanning several years and several releases, while still delivering a working system as it happened. That's not big? How about altering the source package format, or moving away from sha1 for signing, or making everything build reproducibly, or moving all developers using its collaborative development platform from FusionForge to GitLab? Sorry, he's just plain wrong on the "can't make big changes point". Debian regularly makes big changes every major release. In Bullseye they will have made big strides in migrating away from Python2. Changes of this scale are things other projects regularly struggle with, but not Debian.

His posts lists a whole pile of things about Debian he's discovered he no longer likes, which is fair enough. But as he says in his introduction it's him whose that's changed, he gone from a student with lots of time on his hands who was happy to be part of loosely collaborating group to being a member of a very focused and highly directed team at work, and he's discovered he prefers the latter. Great, I get it, happens to all of us. But that doesn't mean the Debian no longer works. It clearly works very well. It just means he's no longer a great fit for that way of doing things.

[zepto]

Very helpful response.

In particular mentioning systemd, which I was very happy to discover on returning to Linux after some time away made this answer very relatable.

[zepto]

Also:

Big Ben is a Victorian hand wound clock. It’s accuracy is maintained by moving a stack of old English pennies balanced on its pendulum. It must be wound by hand three times a week, and it takes one and a half hours to wind every time.

My guess is that the author of the piece we are discussing would find this to be an excellent analogy for the Debian processes he is complaining about.